Mao's thought developed during the early years of this decade, a period of great turmoil, with growing conflict between traditional Chinese thought and new ideas from the West. Mao became an active local leader in the May Fourth Movement of 1919, and he retained his revolutionary fervor. However, he also became convinced that what was needed was more than mass enthusiasm, and also required was an organization of dedicated revolutionaries. The Russian revolution was a model, and Mao attended the founding of the CCP in Shanghai in 1921 and organized the Hunan branch. Two parties developed in the 1920s, the CCP and the KNT (Kuomintang). The KMT-CCP United Front had formed first and then divided into the two separate units. Mao had encouraged peasant activities against landlords, and this had hastened the split. The KIT was allied with the warlords and was thus stronger militarily than the CCP, leaving the CCP struggling in the rural areas. This was one of the reasons for Mao's developing his rural strategy for the Chinese revolution. This involved more than surrounding the cities from the countryside, and instead it became a complex and interdependent synthesis of military, political, and economic elements, utilizing techniques of guerrilla warfare. One measure of the effectiveness of Mao's thought is the degree to which it served to resolve the intellectual conflict underlying it:
The importance of the May Fourth Movement should by now be apparent. Intellectually, the Chinese Revolution originated in the challenging of China's cultural heritage by Western civilization. May Fourth was the culmination of that challenge: the brutal, wholesale repudiation of Confucianism, the symbol of Chinese culture and Chinese history.
China was already undergoing change at the time when Mao became politically active and sought even greater change. One of the changes from the time of Confucius to the time of Mao was that by the later e...